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British author Karen Armstrong is a former Roman Catholic nun who has spent her life researching and writing about the world’s great religions. Her latest book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, looks at religion through time and around the world, from ancient Sumer to modern Pakistan. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Your book implies religion is not the root cause of violence, even though we associate it with the Crusades, the terror of the Bosnian War, the Twin Towers in New York. You argue that violence is embedded in human nature and the nature of the state. You cite University of Chicago international security expert Robert Pape,who argues there is “little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.” This is a hard thing for many of us to swallow, post-9/11.

The suicide attack was invented by the Tamil Tigers, who had no time for religion at all. Until the Iraq War, they easily had the undisputed record for suicide terrorism. Similarly, in Lebanon, what caught the world’s attention was the Shiite Muslim attack on the Americans. But, in fact, surveys show Muslims were responsible for only seven of the 30-plus suicide attacks in Lebanon during the 1980s. Three were committed by Christians and 27 by Baathists (a socialist party) and secularist groups from Syria. As Pape says, it’s a response to the invasion of a peoples’ homeland that is the largest impulse to terrorism.

But the pilots of the planes in the 9/11 tragedy were all from different countries.

Dr. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operative, has made a detailed study of all the people who were involved in 9/11, 500 of them who were connected to Al Qaeda did not have a conventional Muslim upbringing.

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Osama bin Laden conceived and exulted in these attacks and he had a conventional Muslim upbringing.

It was an absolute travesty. Osama bin Laden is a ghastly, terrible man, a criminal who is no more equipped to deliver a fatwa than I am.

I’m not saying religion is not implicated in violent acts, but it is never the whole reason, any more than the murder of Yitzhak Rabin can be attributed to Judaism. (Israeli prime minister Rabin was shot by a Jewish army veteran in 1995.) Or the Ku Klux Klan is related to Christianity, even though they burned crosses.

We are not looking at the situation of terrorism in a rational, balanced way if we simply blame religion. If we want to change hearts and minds, we need to know what is actually in them, not what we imagine might be there.

In ISIS, a significant number of the members are either thugs without any Muslim credentials or former soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s army. That is what makes ISIS so effective on the battlefield.

Young people are leaving Western countries to join this movement. Two of them left Birmingham, England, last May. One of them ordered Islam for Dummies on Amazon. The other one had the book The Koran for Dummies.

Only 20 per cent of young terrorists have had a regular Muslim upbringing. The other 80 per cent are either converts, like the shoe bomber or the gunman at the House of Commons in Ottawa, or they are non-observant, like the Boston Marathon bombers. Or they are self-taught like Mohamed Atta (who flew into the Twin Towers). Their knowledge of tradition is very limited. Marc Sageman concluded the problem was not Islam but ignorance of Islam.

Fundamentalists in the United States seem to believe every word of the New Testament and try to impose their beliefs on others. I am thinking here of creationism in some U.S. schools. The Founding Fathers wanted a country in which state and church were separate.

The fundamentalists are a reaction to that attempt to separate church and state. In every region of the world where a secularist, Western-style government has been established, a religion based counterculture has arisen.

Until the late 19th century, no one read the Bible in a literal way. John Calvin (the pastor involved in the Protestant Reformation) himself didn’t believe in the historicity of the Bible. First, few people could actually read and they would often listen to stories of the Bible in another language, such as Latin. During the Middle Ages, there was a struggle between the kings of various countries and the church about who was going to be top dog. By the 17th century kings became absolute monarchs and they had to marginalize the church.

The French Revolution created the first secular state in Europe, and 17,000 men, women and children were publicly beheaded. Think of the Young Turks slaughtering the Armenians or the Holocaust or the Gulag. If you think the separation of church and state would solve all, you’re wrong. We’ve had two major wars fought for secular reasons.

One of the good things about secularism is that it frees religion from the inequity, the violence of the state.

You write that Muslim fundamentalism “has often — though again, not always — segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity.” Can you briefly what you mean?

When we modernized in the West, we modernized under our own steam. It was an organic growth and we were in charge. When modernity comes from the outside, like it did in the Middle East, it was brought by the colonists, the British and the French.

With modernity, no matter how many skyscrapers you have or fighter jets, the No. 1 thing you have is freedom. Modernity consists of a number of declarations of independence. Inventors and scientists demanded to think independently. In the Middle East, modernity did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation. We were so far ahead they could only copy us. Instead of innovation you have imitation.

Also, secularism is something we could develop gradually. In the Middle East they had to do it overnight. The shahs used to send their men out to rip off women’s veils. Middle Eastern rulers wanted their countries to look modern, to look independent. Nasser captured millions of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and incarcerated them. They were tortured and executed and beaten up. So to them modern secularism seemed evil.

When we look at places like the Middle East, we have to understand that their history is our history too. We helped create the mess.

So what should we do? The U.S., Canadian and British forces are fighting ISIS and this will likely lead to the formation of a new group of terrorists, just like Al Qaeda led to ISIS.

We have to realize how little we know about these things. There are a lot of people who spout off how horrible Islam is. But what do they really know about Islam? We need to have a little humility. We have to look at the root causes or problems.

One of the things we must sort out is the Israeli-Arab conflict. When I was on the UN committee for the Alliance of Civilizations, we put Israel and Palestine into a separate tier. It has become the symbol of everything that is wrong, and people like bin Laden have exploited it.

John Locke (the 17th century liberal British philosopher) created secularism, the separation of church and state. He was a pioneer of human rights but he wasn’t willing to give those human rights to the indigenous peoples in the New World. We British took that attitude in the colonies.

That attitude remains and it has to go. You can’t talk about the evils of Islam when you know nothing about the religion. We need to remember one important thing: all people are created equal.

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